ER/AU dependency

To: the AU group

ER has reviewed the dependencies between ER and AU.

One issue came up.  As for priority: we didn't get to discussing exact
priority as a group, but my personal opinion is that these are priority 3
except the one feature labeled priority 2.

Authoring tools should be able to access evaluation and repair  (ER) tools
by means of

- web based services to which the AU tool would upload the web page and
receive a report and return. This would guarantee that the latest ER tool
was used

and/or

- software such as plugins downloaded and run locally.  This is more
convenient for users not always connected to the net.  With this option,
though, it would be desirable to have a feature that checks if the latest
version is loaded when the user is online.

The simplest output of the ER tools would be a listing for the user to read
and manually apply to the page.  This would only require the tool to upload
the URI and display the output of the tool in a user agent window.  I would
give this particular feature priority 2.

More integration would be preferred.  For example, if the ER tools points
to a problem associated with a particular tag, the tool could automatically
bring an editor to that point to fix the problem.  This would include
editors which operate on the HTML code, or which operate on the rendered
(i.e. WYSIWYG) view.  Even better, if the ER tool specifies a repair, the
AU tool should be about to perform that repair automatically (subject to
authors approval).

A possible way to implement this integration would be for the ER tool to
return the information via RDF.  Specifications for this are well beyond
the scope of this last call note, but we may want to discuss them in the
future.

This interaction would be included at
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WAI-AUTOOLS-19990903/#gl-identify-markup
"Provide methods of checking and correcting inaccessible content"


-------
Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D.
Institute on Disabilities/UAP, and
Department of Electrical Engineering
Temple University

Ritter Hall Annex, Room 423, Philadelphia, PA 19122
kasday@acm.org        
(215) 204-2247 (voice)
(800) 750-7428 (TTY)

Received on Friday, 1 October 1999 17:54:20 UTC